Vietnamese Peach Relish and Fresh Green Peas and Sugar Snap Peas in Sesame Dressing

What do you do when you end up with tons of random farmers' market produce?  We had peaches, shelling peas, sugar snap peas, green beans, wax beans, cherry tomatoes and a bunch of other goodies in the fridge, so it struck me that tonight's meal had to involve at least a few of those ingredients.  I thought a bit and came up with this Vietnamese Peach Relish (served with seared halibut) and a green pea and sugar snap pea salad.  And then you make a salad the next night and another salad the night after that...  Anyway, this dish was one that I thought would be interesting, fresh and vibrant.  And it was all of those things.  Plus it looked pretty on the white plate we served it on.  But Alex and I came to the conclusion that this peach relish (for better or worse) could have been served with anything - grilled chicken breasts, shrimp, pork chops...  You didn't need to spend $20 a pound for halibut because it doesn't really do anything spectacular for the halibut that it couldn't do just as well for another protein.  If I had to pick a halibut recipe to make again, I would go with the Pistachio-Crusted Halibut with Spicy Yogurt that we made last week because that dish was phenomenal and really showed the halibut off nicely.  If I make the relish again (and I think that I will because I liked it and found it interesting) I might try it with a meat to see how it works out.  As for the peas, they were nice but I almost preferred them in their raw state to cooked because the soy sauce and the sesame oil obscured some of the natural sweetness and flavor of the peas.  I also think we needed to dry the peas off a little better so that the dressing would adhere a little better and not be diluted with the cold water that we rinsed the peas with.  My bad.

Recipes after the jump!

Blistered Snap Peas with Mint

After all of my anticipation of our first snap peas of the spring, I have to say that this was not my favorite sugar snap pea recipe.  I was really bummed.  I was so excited for this dish (and for the appearance of sugar snaps at the farmers' market) and it just turned out to be ok.  And when you are expecting awesome things, ok just doesn't cut it.  Blistering the snap peas seemed to mask, rather than enhance the flavor and sweetness of the peas.  I say that it masked the flavor because I had a few raw sugar snaps while trimming them and they were delicious as is - light, fresh and sweet.  And then once I cooked them they lost some of their snap (which is to be expected), but they didn't pick up any additional flavor.  I felt like the lemon evoo just ran right off and didn't provide the sugar snaps with much flavor.  And while I normally love the combination of sugar snaps and mint, I didn't think the mint here did all that much to elevate the dish either.  Maybe I should have stuck to my tried and true Sugar Snap Pea Salad with Radishes, Mint and Ricotta Salata...  I don't know.  But I do know that with the remaining pound of sugar snaps I will be making other (and hopefully more successful) dishes!

Recipe after the jump!

Chinese New Year Meal #6 - Stir-Fried Squid with Black Bean Sauce

I wanted to do something entirely new for our second to last Chinese New Year meal - no more Sichuan or Hunan dishes from Fuchsia Dunlop for at least the next few days.  And I have picked out a traditional Shanghai dish for our last Chinese New Year meal so I think we have done a pretty good job mixing things up this time.  I looked around for awhile before deciding that this dish fit my goal of trying a new dish really well.  We rarely made squid and when we do, we tend to make Mario Batali's Two-Minute Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style or some form of calamari salad.  We also rarely make anything with a black bean sauce.  We buy fermented black beans and use them for a number of dishes, but they are usually only one of many flavoring components.  And black bean sauce is such a classic Chinese sauce that I find it hard to believe that we have made so many dishes without ever making black bean sauce.  So this was an interesting alternative.

Let's see.  What were my thoughts on the meal?  I thought the squid was really tender and the dish had a very different flavor from everything else we made for Chinese New Year.  I was really happy with both of those things.  However, I didn't think the flavors were that amazing.  I would say they were...pretty good.  I'm still going to consider this dish a win because it was a new technique (poor Alex was in charge of scoring the calamari so that it curled up all nice and pretty), a new sauce, and a new flavor that we threw into the mix.

Recipe after the jump!

Sauteed Pea Shoots

Dou miao (pea shoots) are one of my favorite simple Chinese sauteed vegetables.  All you do is stir-fry them briefly with minced garlic, a splash of soy, a little chicken stock and voila.  It's totally delicious and incredibly easy to throw together as a quick side.  Pea tendrils earlier in the season are a little more delicate than pea shoots, so I would recommend using those instead if you can find them.  At this point in the summer all that I could find was pea shoots, but it worked out ok.  I would probably roughly chop the pea shoots in the future so you don't end up with really long strings of veggies in every bite, but otherwise I think the dish was pretty good as is. 


Recipe after the jump!

Sugar Snap Peas with Sesame Dressing

For our Indonesian Grilled Swordfish we needed some sort of quasi-Asian side.  I went through the produce in the fridge and the sugar snap peas seemed to fit the bill best.  So we blanched them, threw on a vaguely Asian sesame oil-based dressing and there you have it.  It was nice and simple.  And tasty.  They weren't a show-stopping side dish, but they weren't meant to be.  I thought that they served their purpose perfectly.  They complimented the swordfish with their subtle Asian flavors without distracting from it.  Better yet, they were super easy.  I'm sure we will make them again in the future.  I might even try the same dressing with a variety of other vegetables.  Maybe asparagus would work?  Or snow peas?

Recipe after the jump!

Asian Flank Steak with Sugar Snap Pea and Pea Shoot Salad

This flank steak had about 10 different mental incarnations.  First I was going to stir fry it with snow peas and serve with pan-friend noodles.  My next idea was to simply season it with salt and pepper, grill it up and serve it with a homemade chimichurri sauce.  Then I was going to make a steak salad of some sort.  Finally I came up with this recipe after I got super excited at the farmer's market and bought some pea shoots.  They were just too beautiful to pass up.  I'm not sure that I have ever had fresh pea shoots in American cuisine, but they are one of my absolute favorite vegetables in Chinese cuisine (dou miao), where they are simply sauteed with garlic.  I love pea shoots cooked that way.  But I don't think I have ever had them raw.  The idea to put them in a salad came from my Cooking in the Moment cookbook by Andrea Reusing where Andrea has a recipe for a Pea Greens with Ume Plum Vinaigrette and Chive Blossoms.  We didn't have enough pea shoots to saute them (unfortunately), but we had a perfect amount for a salad.  So I re-evaluated my flank steak recipe and decided I wanted a vaguely Asian flank steak to go with a vaguely Asian pea shoot salad.  I had a few different ideas for an Asian marinade - the first thing I had to decide was whether I wanted to go Thai/Vietnamese with fish sauce, etc. in the marinade, Japanese with sake, Korean with some sesame oil and Korean red pepper flakes, or Chinese.  I ended up going vaguely Chinese with sherry and soy.  

I thought that these two dishes work together beautifully as a meal.   The flank steak is bold and in your face, with the savory flavors of the soy, the sweetness from the Sherry and the honey, and just a whisper of heat from the sriracha.  Then you contrast the boldness of the flank steak against the subtle flavors of the sugar snap pea and pea shoot salad.  The dressing is not going to blow anyone's mind or change anyone's life, but its subtlety really works to let the delicacy of the fresh pea shoots shine.  I'm a sucker for sesame oil so of course I like the dressing.  I really liked combining the salad and the steak together in each bite because I thought that they complimented each other so well, although both dishes were perfectly fine on their own.  Alex ate them separately and he thought the combination was really nice too.

Recipes after the jump!

Pistachio-Crusted Arctic Char and English Peas with Mint

My first experience with peas was in a casserole that my grandmother prepared.  I want to say that she made the same exact chicken casserole every single time that we visited her; it was something that I began to associate with visits to her house at an early age.  I wouldn't be surprised if there was a nice can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup in there too, but I'm not judging.  I don't think that I had a single fresh pea until I moved to NYC.  They weren't something that we ate at my parents' house.  But I saw fresh English peas at Trader Joe's and thought in the spirit of the season we should get some.  Actually, this dish probably also marks the first time that I had peas as more than a minor component of a dish.  I know you sometimes see peas in chicken pot pie and I generally throw it in there when I make pot pie, but I can't think of a single time that I have ordered or eaten peas by themselves as a side.  I am on a mission to try to expand our vegetable repertoire.  You could say this was something of an experiment.  We eat asparagus and arugula all the time.  They are our go-to vegetables.  When we decide to mix it up we usually move on to some baby spinach, lettuce, Swiss chard, green beans or sugar snap peas (only recently have we begun to play with sugar snaps).  But I really want to add some new veggies and veggie recipes into our catalog.  While I have spent the majority of this post talking about the peas, what I really should discuss is the arctic char.  Char is a fish that I first experienced in NYC.  It's fairly similar to salmon in taste and fat content, although I believe it is a trout.  I'm no fish expert, but I know that I like it.  I found a recipe on Epicurious for Pistachio-Crusted Arctic Char that sounded delicious so I decided to make that along with our peas.  The recipe for the peas was a combination of several recipes I came across, including the one on the label of the peas.  I knew that mint was a natural choice for seasoning peas, but having never made them before I needed some guidance as to cooking time, etc.

So the real winner of this meal was the arctic char, and not the peas.  The basil in the crust got really nice and sweet while roasting in the oven.  The shallot probably contributed to the sweetness too, but what I really tasted was the basil.  The pistachio gave the crust some texture and body - without it the crust would have basically been a sweet basil butter.  While not an amazing fish dish, it was really solid.  The peas on the other side were a little bland and boring.  I guess we didn't use enough salt when we first simmered them and after that nothing we did really gave the peas enough flavor.  In the bites with fresh mint you would get a sense of what the peas would or could taste like if properly cooked and seasoned.  They were also a little starchy, which I guess means we didn't cook them long enough.  Oh well.

Recipes after the jump!

Five-Spice Chicken with Sugar Snaps

Stir-fry is wonderful because it is one of the quickest, easiest things you can make.  You just need to get your ingredients prepped and toss them in a hot wok, then minutes later you have a wonderful meal.  And you can really let your imagination go wild with stir-fry - you can throw in a variety of veggies, meats or seafood, different seasonings, etc.  I enjoy stir-fry so much that I actually bought an entire cookbook devoted to stir-fry.  I have easily a dozen recipes that I have already bookmarked to try.  This was one of them.  I had it down to either this recipe or one for Sichuan Pork with Peppers and Peanuts, but I ended up picking this one.  But don't worry, I will make the Sichuan Pork soon.

My favorite thing about this dish was the sugar snap peas.  I love sugar snaps, but for some reason when I am thinking stir-fry I usually default to snow peas.  But after this, I am going to use sugar snaps in more future stir-fries.  Overall, I thought the dish was good.  It was tasty, the chicken was flavorful and moist, it was simple to make, and it put a whole new spin on stir-fry.  I have never thought to use five-spice in a stir-fry marinade.  And I have certainly never thought to add ketchup to a stir-fry.  The only use for ketchup in my apartment is generally burgers, french fries, and onion rings.  And I'm not sure that I will add ketchup to any future stir-fries, but it was an interesting addition.  I will however use chicken thighs rather than chicken breasts in some of my future stir-fries.  I won't forgo chicken breasts entirely in favor of chicken thighs, but I will mix it up in the future.  And I will definitely experiment more with five-spice!

Recipe after the jump!

Pea Ravioli

Somehow the vegetarian meals we put together often end up being pasta.  And this meal is no exception.  I got the idea for a pea ravioli from an old recipe from Gourmet that I saw years ago, along with the fact that peas are in season now.  Granted, I used frozen peas instead of fresh, but it's almost impossible to find (and deal with) fresh peas.  Instead of making homemade pasta dough to make our ravioli I copped out as usual and used wonton wrappers.  Making homemade pasta is a huge pain.  Peas have always been one of the vegetables that I understood the least.  Growing up the only time I really had peas was when I had the canned/frozen peas that my grandmother used in the casserole she always served us when we came to visit.  To this day I am not a big fan of casserole, although it really doesn't reflect on her cooking abilities so much as the fact that casseroles are gloopy unappetizing messes.  Anyway, this is one of the few times that I have voluntarily cooked peas as an adult.  I am almost certain this is the first time that peas have been the integral component of a meal that I have cooked.  But every once in awhile you have to mix it up a little and cook something completely outside of your normal repertoire.  What fun is cooking if you cook the same ingredients and the same dishes all the time?

I have to admit that I liked these ravioli.  Maybe peas aren't so bad after all!  When cooked in these ravioli the peas were sweet and fresh.  The Parmigiano-Reggiano in the filling gave the peas a nutty, salty flavor to balance out the sweetness of the peas.  I was thinking that some fresh ricotta would also be a delicious component of the ravioli, only it would accentuate, rather than counterbalance, the sweet flavor of the peas.  It would also give the pea filling a creamier, smoother texture.  I can't say that I have ever tasted peas with fresh mint in them (even though the combination is a classic one), but the mint really went wonderfully with the peas.  All of the flavors are fresh and bright - perfect springtime fare.

Recipe after the jump!

Mediterranan Roast Shrimp and Israeli Couscous with Asparagus and Sugar Snap Peas

Sorry guys!  I know we disappeared for awhile, but it's not my fault!  We were in FL for 5 days for a good friends' wedding and before that my Dad was in town visiting so we were running around like chickens with our heads cut off.  I had this post prepped and almost ready to go, but never had any time to sit down and finish it!  Alex and I went to Costco a few weekends ago and bought the world's largest bag of asparagus and some really nice looking tiger prawns.  So I had to figure out something to do with them for dinner that night.  I found the couscous recipe first and then decided that we would make some sort of simple Mediterranean shrimp to serve alongside the couscous. 

Ever since discovering how easy it is to roast shrimp, it has become one of my favorite methods of preparing shrimp.  I love sauteing and stir-frying shrimp too, but sometimes it's really nice to just throw it in the oven while you get the rest of the meal ready and not have to pay any attention to it.  Here we tossed the shrimp with garlic, evoo, butter, crushed red pepper flakes, lemon zest, and some toasted coriander and fennel seeds.  I got the idea to use the coriander and fennel seeds from Crescent City Cooking by Susan Spicer.  We have made other variations similar to shrimp scampi with just the evoo, garlic, butter and crushed red pepper flakes, but we have never added any other spices before.  Surprisingly enough, both Alex and I really enjoyed the coriander and fennel seeds.  I say surprisingly enough because Alex tends not to like fennel seeds (although he likes them more than caraway seeds, which he absolutely hates).  In the future I would probably crush them a little more finely than I did here because I did have one or two bites where I essentially had a mouthful of fennel seeds.  Which completely blows out your tastebuds.  But the combination of flavors was really interesting and one I would make again.  You could play with all manner of herbs and seasonings with this general recipe.

I thought that the couscous recipe was interesting.  It was a nice way to get some vegetables into your diet.  And since I love asparagus and sugar snap peas, it was great to serve them in the same dish.  I don't really like peas so I left them out entirely.  This recipe vaguely reminds me of the Disappearing Zucchini Orzo that Alex and I make from time to time.  I'm not sure which one I like better, although in some ways I might prefer the orzo to the Trader Joe's Harvest Grains Blend that we used here.  I feel like the orzo absorbs more of the flavor from the veggies than the couscous does.  I also thought that I have had better Israeli couscous recipes, including this recipe for Toasted Israeli Couscous with Pine Nuts and Parsley.  But with all of those things said, I think it is a really nice side and one that I would make again.  I'm curious to see how the leftover couscous will taste cold or at room temperature.  In some ways I think it would make an excellent picnic or potluck dish, rather than a hot side dish.

Recipes after the jump!

Sugar Snap Pea Salad with Radishes, Mint and Ricotta Salata

Planning out our menus around our CSA produce can get a little exhausting.  First of all, there is always at least one crucial ingredient for every recipe that we are missing, which requires a trip to the grocery store.  We have so much produce, but as we are trying not to buy anymore produce from the grocery store we are inevitably missing a crucial herb or something else.  For instance, we had everything for this recipe - the radishes, the mint, and the sugar snap peas were all from the CSA - except for the ricotta salata.  We probably have 10 types of cheese in the fridge right now, just not ricotta salata.  Bummer.  But considering this recipe is using up so much of our CSA produce I can't complain too much.

We served our Sugar Snap Pea Salad with some wild king salmon that we prepared using Tyler Florence's Salt and Pepper Salmon recipe - which incidentally is one of my absolute favorite ways to simply prepare a nice piece of salmon.  And it was a fabulous meal.  I loved the salad - it was so fresh and seasonal - and it paired wonderfully with the salmon.  I always like sugar snap peas, but the combination of the sugar snap peas, radishes, mint and ricotta salata just blew me away.  What a wonderful summer dinner.

Recipe after the jump!

Stir-Fried Sugar Snap Peas with Chinese Sausage

I have a bad habit of buying far too much produce anytime I hit the farmers' market or the grocery store in early summer.  Everything just looks so fresh and delicious.  Even though our fridge was already full to the brim, I couldn't resist buying some more fresh asparagus and sugar snap peas, as well as a gigantic daikon, at the farmers' market behind the Museum of Natural History on Sunday.  So today for lunch I had to figure out how to use some of that produce.  This was the result.  We had to modify the recipe somewhat because it called for far too much liquid, but I am modifying the recipe even further here so the sauce thickens up even more.

The flavors were really good here.  I loved the combination of the sweet Chinese sausage and the sugar snap peas and asparagus.  You have to be really careful not to overcook the vegetables because then they will just be mushy and gross.  Part of the beauty of this dish is tasting the rich, savory and sweet sausage balanced against the fresh crisp vegetables.

Recipe after the jump!

Sauteed Snow Peas and Asparagus

Sometimes you just need a dish of simple sauteed veggies as part of your dinner.  This is the perfect light side for almost any Asian dish.  The flavors of the ginger, garlic and sesame oil are wonderful, but light so that they won't compete with the flavors of your entree.  I love the crunch of the snow peas, and I think that the combination of the snow peas and the asparagus created wonderful dish - both in terms of texture and flavor.  This whole dish just screamed spring to me, which I love.

Recipe after the jump!